Turn to page 123 in your work-in-progress. (If you haven’t gotten to page 123 yet, then turn to page 23. If you haven’t gotten there yet, then get busy and write page 23.) Count down four sentences and then instead of just the fifth sentence, give us the whole paragraph.

Page 23 is, well, unreadable. So, instead, here is the opening of Across the Seven Continents of the Underworld, for your amusement:

"Matthew Brady was transported at the age of twenty-two for murder.

He considered it a black piece of humour that he had been convicted for the death of one man since, from the age of sixteen, he had been a member of the Shibtri Isles army. For nearly six years, he had fought in campaigns across dry, burnt soil and beneath empty red skies while wearing the dark, maroon uniform of his native country. It was the only employment he had known. He had begun it, not from a sense of patriotism, but rather with the prospect of adventure, of the dangerous and violent nature of that adventure offered to him, and the attraction it held. He wasn't like his brother, Alex—Alexander—who had a natural gift of intelligence and interest in the work of a Mortician, and who was offered an apprenticeship at the age of thirteen, and said goodbye to the orphanage and underfunded public school system that they were both stuck in. No, for Brady, life existed in the physical, the tangible, and the pleasures that this offered, and so when the recruiters stood in their own maroon uniforms in the middle of the broken cement quadrangle of the school he attended and told him that he could have a life with money, food, and travel, he did not hesitate to sign up. That he was to be part of campaigns that resulted in the deaths of men and women who he had no personal connection did not bother him. Likewise, he was similarly unconcerned by the destruction that was caused to towns and cities and countries that he visited. Why should he have been? The question of why he was there had been made before the army was sent into battle, and he never saw a reason to question them—until, that is, he killed William Morris."